Getting Started

 My expectation is that if I stay in Austin over the winter, the cedar trees will pollinate, and I will be miserable.  So I would like to get out town for a significant chunk of the cedar fever season, from the middle of December to the middle of February. Linda and I decided to go to Hawaii for most of January.

Like when we went to Barcelona and Florence, we decided to use AirBnB for our rooms.  Southwest had reasonable times and costs for the flights.  We found a place in Honolulu for the first half of the trip and then a place on the Big Island (Hawaii), for the second half.  The final timing was leaving Austin on 28 Dec, flying to Honolulu, staying in Honolulu until 11 Jan and then flying to Kona for the second half.  On 30 Jan, we fly out of Kona, back to Austin.

In Honolulu, we will be in a city, so we will try to not rent a car, but use public transportation, or walking. On Hawaii, since we fly in and out of Kona, but our AirBnB place is on the other side of the island, we will rent a car.

Jennifer will stay and look after Oscar and the house. Kathryn gives us a ride to the airport.  And we are off!  The flight out goes okay.  It’s long and boring.

When we land in Honolulu, it is getting dark.  The flight arrives at 5:30, but it is 6:30 before we have our bags and are ready to get from the airport to the room we have downtown in Waikiki. We have tried to set things up to use Uber, but Uber says it will be $66.  The transportation desk at the airport says a taxi should be about $40 or $45.  So we take a taxi.  It ends up being $60.

When we get to the AirBnB, it is about 7:00 or so.  Which is 11pm in Austin.  So we are really tired from just the length of the trip.  Which makes the difficulties with the room seem even bigger.  There seems to be little light in the lobby to find our lockbox and key fob, and even less once we get up the the 6th floor for our room (Room 602).  When we finally get in our room, it seems to be just one bad design after another.  There is no place to hang clothes.  There are a set of plastic clothes hangers, but nothing to hang them on.  There is no place to hang the towels after we shower.  Literally, no towel bars.  The table is about 2 feet by 32 inches and stands 38 inches tall.  There is a support for a suitcase, but not for the large size suitcases we brought.  There are two extra pillows (Linda likes pillows, so that’s good), but there are no pillow cases for them.

But finally we get showered and off to bed.

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